It Must Be Time For Penitence

If I try to conceptualize what the ultimate goal of parenting might be, it seems for a long minute like the answer is obvious and clear, but when I go to speak it, the ideas fail to coalesce into anything say-able. I'm exactly the same way with lyrics to REM songs.

The obvious problem is that the goal keeps changing because the kids refuse to stop Becoming and just sit still and Be for two fucking seconds. Well, the ultimate ultimate goal I guess is the same in that you don't want to accidentally kill them in any way. That's the first and most terrifying reality of bringing home a tiny blob of a worm-creature lacking anything any of the cooler species might have right out of the chute like claws or stingers or functioning legs to run away on. Anything to, you know, pitch in and take some of the burden square off the shoulders of New Dad there, already preoccupied trying to metabolize massive emotional swings between projecting his unmolded boy-child as the quarterback of some damned team or another and facing the tangible, blooded evidence of the carnal limits of the lifedeath cycle. Dude just witnessed one end of the mortality parabola where it touches earth at the start of the upward arc. The idea that there is truly and inescapably an opposite end where it crashes into the earth, a puddle of nameless goo, becomes super-real in a hurry. Figure all that out and try to keep the regular feeding schedule straight, guy who two weeks ago had to call his father-in-law because he'd been decisively bested in a four-day running battle of wits with the IKEA crib set. Now here, operate this whole extra human.

So you manage not to kill them or let them kill themselves, but the thing that's important? That keeps getting buried in mounds of smelly context. You had grand goals and aspirations, a whole pyramidal parenting ethos worked out and lovingly recorded in your Baby Book,* but you did that back when the kid was theoretical and the existential terror was still sequestered away in the safe, green country of Naivete, beyond the bounds of where your limited imagination was able to carry you. The Point of parenting ceases to be strategic and turns all tactical: just hope they're healthy. Maybe keep the TV viewing to under 11 hours per day. Get them into the school that doesn't need the metal detectors. Shiv the Little League coach if he talks to the kid like that one more time, swear to God. Get it to sit for the SATs. Get it car insurance. Get it medical insurance. Get it the fuck out of your basement.

Crisis bleeds into crisis (not literally, if you're lucky) and somewhere in all the negotiation and improvisation, you find out you're living with a quasi-adult who hates you. Infants are a gateway responsibility to teenagers, which, like heroin, can only eventually kill you.

I'm finding out that the worst thing you can want is control. My oldest one started high school yesterday. Looking at him and blinking the single blink that all his fourteen years fit into, I realize the last four years of his secondary education are, cosmically and even mortally speaking, nothing at all. In one of my rare, grander parenting-ideas moments--one that will be guaranteed to evoke laughter in a far-flung future when the tinge of tragedy has wafted away--I'm feeling like, for all the intervention I want to do, there's really nothing to do but stay out of his way and trust, to the degree it's possible and with some room for correction, that the groundwork I've laid up through this past Tuesday will be enough to support the ever-increasing mass as my boy cuts more and more of an adult-type shape in the world.

It seems like it can't be. I had no idea what I was doing. But what I'm hoping for is to avoid the war-zone that some father-teenage son arrangements can devolve into in these fleeting, testosterone-heavy years. If I've done enough of it right, I'll be able to forego the screeching, interruptive, preemptive "I told you..." in favor of the occasional wry head-shake and a gentle reminder: "I told you so."

And, again ideally, he'll eventually agree with me. Because I totally fucking did.

---

*This applies to parents of first children only. Second children may get a name and a few pictures in a baby book, but no significant original content. Third children get their name pinned to help people remember.